8 Modern Survival Movies That’ll Put You Off Going Outdoors

One of the great things about cinema is its ability to transport you to places you've never seen and into situations you've never experienced. In a darkened room at the local multiplex, a viewer can be taken to those hard-to-reach parts of the globe that they'd otherwise never visit, placed in a scenario they never dreamed of finding themselves in. One advantage of this quality of cinema is that audiences can escape their lives momentarily, go to those extreme places, and live those hardcore experiences without having to deal with any of the potential danger that comes with it; basically, there's the excitement and the wonder, minus any of the pants-shitting terror. This, surely, is the appeal of the survival movie, and the reason why it seems to lately be somewhat in vogue. Later this year, Leonardo DiCaprio will tackle a bear and attempt to cross hundreds of miles of frozen North American tundra in The Revenant, while those looking for their survival cinema fix right now will find Baltasar Kormakur's grueling Everest playing nationwide. And what Kormakur's draining film has in common with so many survival movies is this: it'll leave you with a newfound love of indoor living. On that note, here are eight recent examples of survival movie that will have you rethinking any upcoming outdoors adventures. 8) All Is Lost A vanity trip around the world turns into a holiday from hell for retired mariner Robert Redford, only in this survival movie, hell looks like a punctured sailing boat drifting aimlessly across a tranquil Indian Ocean. A blistering storm set-piece aside, for most of J.C. Chandor's masterful ode to the human spirit, Redford's Our Man isn't up against the punishing elements - it's his own limited knowledge and lack of preparation that leaves him lost, floating in foreign waters, and facing likely death. Like the best survival films, All Is Lost makes the rising desperation felt, as man is dwarfed by his unforgiving environment. Chandor makes the film feel like something approaching a religious experience - albeit one that you'd never want to personally endure in a million years. By the time Our Man is reduced to drinking sea water, you're canceling any plans you had for going on a sailing trip come retirement. 7) Into The Wild As in All Is Lost, the threat to the main 'survivalist' character in Into the Wild is the fact he doesn't really know how to survive - at least not in an environment largely untouched by man and that he's naively assumed won't be out to kill him. Sean Penn's fourth film as director is based on Jon Krakauer's non-fiction book, about the outdoor odyssey of Christopher McCandless, AKA Alexander Supertramp, a promising college graduate who in the early 90s left his privileged life behind to live amongst nature. For the majority of the film, Into the Wild is like an idealistic young dropout's dream, telling a tale of rebelling against the system, going off-grid, and starting over as a self-sustaining nomad. And Into the Wild makes it all seem doable - until McCandless mixes up which berries are poisonous and which aren't, scoffs a mouth-load of the bad stuff, and begins to slowly die, far away from the medical help that could save his life. Bummer. 6) Life Of Pi A boy and his tiger head out to sea on a raft built for two, and come to discover an understanding between man and beast in the process - sounds pretty whimsical, right? Wrong. For all Life of Pi's technical wizardry, wondrous cinematography and magical realist tendencies, the underlying truth is that - spoiler alert! - all the cozy, animal-related high seas hijinks are just figments of the lead character's imagination. In reality, as we find out later, all the fantastical stuff we see in the film is a lie concocted by survivor Pi Patel, with everything following the capsizing of the freighter carrying him and family across the ocean being a cover for the awful truth. So if it wasn't bad enough that the young Pi faced the real daily threat of drowning with just a tiny lifeboat for sanctuary, it turns out there was the added element of the young man having to witness his mother being killed by the freighter's cook, then in turn killing said cook and feasting on his flesh in order to survive. 5) The Grey Trailers promise a down-and-dirty Liam Neeson action movie in which the growling sexagenarian has a fist fight with wolves - but don't be fooled. The Grey is a survival movie through-and-through, and a gritty, depressing one at that. The film does feature that outrageous scene, where Neeson's John Ottway fashions himself some wolf-dicing knuckle dusters out of smashed bottles of booze miniatures, but it doesn't come until the very end. Up to that point, it's a sober, harrowing story of survival, with the twist being that hardly anybody manages to survive. Having crash-landed in wintry Alaska, John attempts to guide a rag-tag team out of wolf territory, and back to the safety of civilization. But the weather is perilous, and the wolves don't consider it polite that a bunch of alpha males have stepped onto their turf. Unless you're 1) Liam Neeson, or 2) handy with weaponry improvised by your own fair hands in the harsh wilderness, it's probably best you don't venture out into the middle of snowy Alaska any time soon. 4) 127 Hours 127 Hours requires you to spend almost an entire 94 minutes in the company of James Franco alone. But as agonizing as that might sound, even the film's description doesn't prepare you for the excruciating pain that is 127 Hours, a movie in which Franco's hyperactive adventurer is forced to drink his own urine, cut off his own arm and stagger miles across a baking desert, having survived on nothing but his own stale piss for five days. Based on a true story, Franco plays Aron Ralston, a man who back in 2003 truly did all those things. Danny Boyle's movie makes the bold decision of rarely venturing from Ralston's side, as he finds his arm trapped under a falling boulder in the wilds of Utah, and himself lodged in a mountain crevasse with no help for - yep, you guessed it - 127 hours. The most memorable scene, of course, is when Ralston loses the arm, using nothing but a blunt pen knife. Keep your eyes and ears open for when he slices through that nerve... 3) Captain Phillips Thinking of applying for a job aboard a container ship, or taking a sailing trip along the coast of Africa? Captain Phillips will put you straight - in Paul Greengrass' tense true story adap, titular ship's captain Tom Hanks is just doing his job hauling valuables around the Horn of Africa when a group of desperate, heavily armed Somali pirates decide they want some of what Phillips is having, and board the ship in search of booty. From there it's a battle of wits, words, and occasionally bullets, between wily everyman Phillips and Barkhad Abdi's ruthless Muse. The genius of Greengrass and screenwriter Billy Ray's approach is that you understand totally where the poverty-stricken Somali mercenaries are coming from, putting you in their shoes even as the gung-ho American authorities come to save the day. That said, after this and All Is Lost, you'll never want to go anywhere near the Indian Ocean. 2) Rescue Dawn For much of Rescue Dawn, it's not a case of man coming up against the elements, but a group of POWs struggling to stay alive in a military camp controlled by the Pathet Lao (Laos' very own Viet Cong). So it's a prison movie and a war drama first, before it shifts gears around the halfway mark to a harrowing, occasionally hallucinatory survival tale, with said hallucinations suffered by Christian Bale's downed US Navy pilot Dieter Dengler, and brought on by the fact that he's slowly starving to death in the Laotion jungle. Naturally, as it's a film starring Christian Bale that requires the lead character to physically wither away, Rescue Dawn sees Bale dropping the pounds to the point where you're amazed this guy was ever buff enough to play Batman. Living off the land in Southeast Asia, apparently, isn't a very achievable goal - witness Dengler at the end of the film, emaciated and asking himself whether those earth worms he was fed back in camp were so bad after all. 1) Everest Declared by some to be the Gravity of 2015, it's easy to see why the parallels were made between Alfonso Cuaron's Oscar-winning film and Everest: Almost unbearably tense and gripping, there's a very real sense in Everest - as in Gravity - of the desperation felt way out of the realm of human safety, far away from help and even further away from home. The difference is that where Gravity was fiction, Everest is factual, and documents a trip that you yourself could take should you wish to do so. Not that you'd be likely to after seeing Everest, a film that confirms that, even if you survive surmounting the world's biggest mountain, you could go home minus a nose and all the fingers you went up with. What starts out as a bit of a lark soon descends into pure survival horror, as even experienced climbers freeze to death and get sent plummeting to their doom by a savage snowstorm. See it in 3D for the ultimate impact, and put yourself off mountains for life.